Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Zorro's Fighting Legion

James Reasoner has an excellent post on Zorro's Fighting Legion over at Rough Edges. (You'll have to scroll down to find it, since he's already started watching another great serial, Undersea Kingdom.) I've see Zorro's Fighting Legion a couple of times, the first when I was a little kid. I'm sure I've mentioned before how the boys in my fourth or fifth grade class used to march around the playground chanting in a monotone, "Don del Oro. Don del Oro." Many years later, I bought a VHS tape of the serial and watched it again. I let my rotten kid brother borrow the tape, and he never returned it. So when I saw it on DVD a while back, I bought it. And James' post spurred me to start watching it yet again. I was planning to watch only a few episodes, but it's so much fun I'm sure I'll watch all of it. You have your swordfights, your bullwhips, your secret cave hideout . . . what more could you ask for? Maybe a great theme song, and this serial sure has one: "We ride, with the wind/ over hill over dale/ with a spirit that cannot fail/ men of Zorro are we." Hard to top.

5 comments:

I saw Zorro's Fighting Legion at my first comic book convention in 1971. I stayed up half the night watching episode after episode and it was brutal. Hearing that theme song repeatedly, seeing the precis of the previous installment just minutes after seeing the installment...well, let's just say I haven't had a burning desire to see it again for a long, long time.

I've learned never to watch more than two episodes in a row. And when I do watch a couple back-to-back, I usually fast-forward through the opening of the second one and pick it up where the cliffhanger left off.

Correction, please. I saw the marathon ZFL in 1970. I would have spaced out the viewings, James, but I was part of the audience at the con's film show and the projectionist might have objected. Hard to imagine a world without videos and DVDs, but this was back in those prehistoric times.